Reply #13: You're essentially asking for apples to be oranges [View All]

[alcibiades_mystery]

1) The Civil Rights Movement "leaders" is more or less a myth concocted after the fact, according to our favorite "Great Man Theory of History." Most of the organizing went on below the surface among thousands of anonymous workers who organized at the local level.

2) The African American civil rights struggle could rely on a) a definitive and recognized "identity" together with b) clearly demarcated communities and community structures. It's not a surprise that most of the putative 'leader figures" came out of well-established religious organizations, that is, already established community structures. The problem for the GLBT movement is precisely that the identity is under siege for individual members (i.e., it's still not easy to 'come out" for many, many GLBT people), and that the community structures are fairly recent in their emergence. It's not, then, surprising, that you would see the strongest organized elements of a GLBT movement in the places where GLBT communities have flourished (i.e., in specific urban areas). But it still makes it difficult to organize.

3) Historically, the African American civil rights struggle had the advantage of narrowband media, so to speak: you still had something like the emergence of national figures in opposition movements then. With today's broadband media, the attention space of public opinion is much more scarce, so it's more difficult to put forth some definitive voice or even several definitive voices, which may be just as well (shouldn't we all be sick to death of the Leader Principle anyway?).

The MAIN lesson of the African American civil rights struggle is that you have to be attentive to specific historical conditions, and you cannot merely import some past model as if it will work equally well today. In other words, the lesson is to take that which seems to work, while abandoning the strategies that were specific to THAT occasion, and INVENTING new strategies. The African American cicil rights struggle was actually remarkably inventive. It didn't just rely on tropes and tactics from other struggles. It invented new ones that were more appropriate for its occasion.